Hellish paradise, Brazil? – 02/08/2023 – Sérgio Rodrigues

Today I would like to talk about a valuable word that has been terribly oppressed in Brazil. All because of a silly and unnecessary prosodic quiproquo, of those that are so dear to the national baccalaureate soul.

It’s nothing that will change the course of the Republic, but it’s worth telling this story because, as the proverb says, the devil is in the details. I’m talking about oxymoron, an erudite rhetorical term that means “a figure of speech in which two excluding ideas merge into a single statement”. Do you know the “disgruntled contentment” of Camões?

Unfortunately, all the greatest Brazilian authorities on the language pull the ear of anyone who writes or pronounces oxymoron like this, as proparoxytone —or tries to do so, because proofreaders are paid not to let them. They say that the right thing is oxymoron, a paroxytone term (“oxymoron”), and that’s the end of it.

As a result, well-meaning speakers, not wanting to break the law or appear ignorant, but at the same time not at all willing to use such a wretched and soul-crooked word as “oxymoron”, prefer simply not to use it. And then we get to the worst of all worlds—the self-censorship, the silence.

The gratuity of the trouble is what bothers the most. In addition to being more widespread (okay, among the few who know and use it, but you get the point), oxymoron is at least as acceptable a form as the competing form in light of the history of the language.

It should be noted that in Portugal the form condemned in Brazil is by far the preferred one — the only one, incidentally, that appears in the dictionary of the Academy of Sciences in Lisbon.

Priberam, a good free-to-access Lusitanian digital dictionary, offers both options. Yes, there are those moments when our academicist pedantry surpasses that of the people who bequeathed us such a treasure.

Need I add that “oxymoron” has even begun to drag behind it, in recent years, the unpleasant echoes of the name of a dishonest judge?

Houaiss also embarks on the veto of proparoxytone oxymoron, but seems to know better than to do so. So much so that he defends himself in a note: “As for the accentuation of the word, this dictionary preferred to follow in Portuguese the Latin prosody to the Greek one, as did Rebelo Gonçalves, Laudelino Freire, Aurélio etc”.

Greek and Latin, yeah. The word was born in the first as “oxymoron” (to later migrate to the second as “oxymorum”) by the combination in a single body of the ideas of acute, sharp (oxy) and dull, stupid (moros). That is, the oxymoron is also an oxymoron!

Anyone who judges how sharp or stupid is the decision to block speakers’ access to one of two etymological-prosodic paths that are so clear.

To find a strong case of Brazilian oxymoron on my bookshelf, I have to resort to the classic “Dictionary of Literary Terms”, by Massaud Moisés.

There I read that the oxymoron, known since antiquity, “reached great vogue during the hegemony of the Baroque (17th century), but its use continues until our days, including in everyday language, in expressions such as ‘illustrious unknown'”.

The underutilization of the word (and therefore also of the idea) in Brazil is regrettable for several reasons. Among them, that of depriving many people of a good rhetorical weapon to cope with life in such an oxymoronic country —infernal paradise, Edenic hell, dwarf giant— and in a no less oxymoronic world of luxurious garbage perpetually recycled and raised to mechanical powers.

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